


she's a (rock & roll survivor)

by loyaulte_me_lie



Category: Red White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston
Genre: Bea-centric, Character Study, Drabbles, Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Music, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-10-09 21:44:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20516915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loyaulte_me_lie/pseuds/loyaulte_me_lie
Summary: "Good for you," Stevie Nicks says, "the world needs more rock and roll princesses." // the (un)making of Beatrice Fox Mountchristen Windsor.





	she's a (rock & roll survivor)

**Author's Note:**

> Bea is wonderful and I both love and am very interested in her. Hence this. Title from L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. by Noah and the Whale.
> 
> Warnings: bereavement, drug abuse, mourning & grief, and Queen Mary isn't the nicest grandma in the world, let me put it that way.

_"if we're lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin."_

**~ Ocean Vuong, _On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous_**

**i.**

See this is the thing: if you look back at all the old pictures, there’s always a divide. Phillip is on one side, always looking serious and poised, a prince down to every last cell with not a single blonde hair out of place. Henry and Bea are together. Normally Henry is distracted by something – a snail, a twig, the enormity of the white clouds scurrying across the blue, blue sky. Sometimes he’s distracted by Bea herself. There’s one memorable photo of Bea and Henry, aged six and three, having a swordfight amongst the bluebells with a pair of sticks they’d found. Phillip stands on a tree stump and looks totally aloof.

In all those photos Bea is always laughing. When she looks back during the depths of her cocaine-fuelled grief, she doesn’t know why.

**ii.**

Rock n’roll is a love affair that Bea starts when she’s five years old and sitting in the front seat of her Dad’s car, driving back from the latest James Bond location where she’d been keeping him company. He puts on Queen and hits the accelerator, the PPOs in the car behind them revving to keep up. The rain mists against the windshield and Freddie Mercury’s voice soars, stretches, reverberates. The guitar sings and Bea has never felt so _alive. _

“Dad,” Bea says, halfway down the M4.

“Yes?”

“I want to be just like Freddie Mercury when I grow up.”

“Okay, sweetie,” Dad says, tapping his fingers along to the beat. “I reckon we can manage that.”

Three weekends later, her parents take her to a charity concert Fleetwood Mac are playing at and Dad carries her around on his shoulders. Bea watches Stevie Nicks croon into the microphone and falls in love even more. Afterwards, Mum and Dad take her up to say hello and she is suddenly overtaken with shyness, hiding in Mum’s leg.

“My little girl wants to be a rock star,” Dad says, jovial, and Stevie Nicks gives her a sudden grin. “Imagine that.”

“Good for you,” Stevie Nicks says, “the world needs more rock-star princesses.”

**iii.**

When Bea plays her first open mic concert she’s eighteen and at university and no-one knows or cares who she is. She’s just a white girl in a flowery dress with a shiny guitar, and she sings her way through all the songs she’s played for Mum and Dad and Henry in the sitting room at Kensington Palace. Not many people pay attention.

“Open mics are great,” Ed Sheeran says when she runs into him at the royal garden party that year and they spend a good hour drinking champagne and chatting about music, “you’re never going to learn how to play to a big crowd if you can’t make a small one eat out of the palm of your hand.”

He invites her out with his friends several times that summer, and when they end up at an open mic Harry Styles and Taylor Swift volunteer her to do a few songs. She mock glares and rolls her eyes and complains, but eventually is forced up and sings a few covers of Queen and Noisettes and finishes off with an attempt at Anything Goes, which is Henry’s favourite song at the moment because who ever knew her baby brother would have a resounding teenage musicals phase.

When she comes back to sit down, Ed hi-fives her and says, “You’re getting there, mate. Keep plugging along.”

She doesn’t stop smiling for a week.

**iv.**

“I do not understand why you cannot learn something classical,” Gran says over a tea once when their parents are on a state visit. “Why must you focus on all this…popular music?”

Only Queen Mary could make “popular” sound like shit. Bea wants to sink further into her chair, wonders why out of all of them only Phillip seems to be the one Gran actually likes. But then again, as she tells Henry, who would want to be Phillip? Sure Gran might like him, but he’s got a stick so far up his own arse that it’s amazing he a) has any friends or b) enjoys his life at all. And he doesn’t understand the importance of feminism, either. How he’s managed that with parents like theirs Bea has _zero _clue, but hey ho, you can’t choose your relatives. Everyone’s got to have _one _least favourite human in their family, she guesses.

“It’s fun, Gran,” Bea says.

“_Fun _is not what you should be thinking about, Beatrice. You have a duty.”

“A duty to be the best singer in the world,” Henry jumps to her defence, “Bea’s really good, Gran.”

Queen Mary sniffs, and changes the subject. Bea chokes down the boiling anger, feels it sear her windpipe. Why does Gran have to be so old fashioned, so close-minded? Phillip’s going to be the one who carries on the line; he’s the only one of them who actively _wants _to. He’s off with the army at the moment, and he’ll get married at some point and pop out some babies, be the perfect dutiful second in line to the throne. It’s great because _she doesn’t have to._

Henry shifts his chair closer when Gran isn’t looking, gives her an eye-roll. She pulls a ghastly face back.

Later, they’ll go and bounce on her bed and scream the lyrics to the latest Fall Out Boy album until their equerry comes in to say that their parents are on the phone. What would she do if she didn’t have Henry?

**v.**

She goes to gig after gig, makes a deal with Henry that if she accompanies him to plays and David Bowie tribute acts, he’ll come with her to Noisettes and Fall Out Boy and Queen and HAIM and Mumford and Sons on all his exeats. With her friends she goes out to all the little hipster bars and chats to everyone who sings, wracking their brains for their process and inspiration.

“What are you writing?” Henry asks when he’s back from Eton that summer, bright-eyed and full of stories about what his new best friend Percy Okonjo has been up to. Bea can’t wait to meet Percy. He sounds like the biggest laugh in the entire world.

“Mind your own business,” she says for the sake of sisterly form, followed quickly by, “songs. I think I’ve got some ideas.”

“_Cool_._” _Henry flops across her bed with a copy of A Picture of Dorian Gray. “Let me know if you need help with them on the piano or whatever.”

“You’re the best.”

“I know.”

She leans over and ruffles his hair. “Glad to have you home, buddy.”

**vi.**

“You were so good!” Dad says, standing up and wrapping her in a hug. Bea grins into his shoulder. He squeezes her tighter. “My little girl, getting the whole pub on their feet! I’m so proud of you!”

“Thanks Dad.” Bea’s heart is so full it could burst.

“I’m dragging your Mum next time, state dinner or no state dinner. When is the next time? Will you do some in London over the summer?”

“I think so? Ed wants to see some of the stuff I’ve been writing, and Henry’s been bugging me about singing somewhere he and Pez can actually get in.”

“I’m surprised that Percy struggles to get in anywhere,” Dad says.

“He’s seventeen,” Bea sits down, “like, he’s the most charming human ever to exist, but still – millionaire’s son or not the bouncers won’t let him in most of the bars.”

“Eh, if I drag them in with me it’ll be okay,” Dad says, so self-assured, so James Bond that Bea has to laugh. “You just get some dates organised, yeah. I’ll see if Matt’s around at any point to show you some of his new guitar stuff.”

Since they wrote the front song for Dad’s latest James Bond movie, Dad’s become sudden friends with Matt Bellamy of Muse. He’s an odd dude, Bea thinks, but kind of hilarious and very _very _good at what he does. Any opportunity to learn some of his virtuoso guitar skills will be freaking _awesome. _

“Love you, Dad,” she says.

“Love you too, sweetheart,” he replies, knocking his glass against hers. “Come on, let’s forget we have royal duties for a bit.”

“You just want to get pissed with my uni mates.”

“Of course I do! Anything to give your Gran an aneurysm.”

“You’re so bad.”

“I know. Ah, they’re just over there. Come on, let’s go!”

**vii.**

Contrary to popular opinion, she does have friends. A few of them. Mostly it’s the music crowd she sidles up to at royal events, shamelessly using her position to meet people she thinks are cool. The uni crowd are fine, and she’s still chatting to a couple of them a few months after graduation but her mind’s on music and all the people that come along with it.

She’s at a bar with Ed and Harry and wondering whether to go and introduce herself to Shingai Shoniwa who she’s had the biggest celebrity crush on _forever_ when she gets the call.

“Dad’s in hospital,” Phillip says down the phone, his voice a taut line. “King Edward VII. Can you get there?”

Bea’s stomach sinks through the floor. Ed notices her expression, reaches out to put his hand on hers, his face creased with concern.

“Yeah,” Bea says. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

**viii.**

They’re in the hospital room and when the monitor flatlines, Bea runs.

She barrels down the corridor, past the doctors and nurses with a PPO hard on her tail, banging through doors until she’s outside and tripping over her feet in the carpark, colliding with the asphalt. Pain judders up her knees and arms and she curls into a ball, rocking back and forth, a fist shoved in her mouth.

Eventually arms lock around her, and Henry’s there too, shaking and holding her and crying. Phillip joins them after a while, and the three royal children huddle in the freezing carpark of the King Edward VII hospital, the moonlight like weak water through the trees.

He’s gone, Bea thinks. He’s gone. Can it get any worse than this?

**ix.**

She goes to Ed’s and lies in his bed and cries and cries and cries. Ed's cool new girlfriend takes one look at her, pitiful and wearing some old hoodie, and goes to put the kettle on before joining the cuddle pile. Neither of them let go of her all night.

**x.**

After, she drifts. She doesn’t remember much of it; just doing lines of cocaine in the bathrooms of bars with her brand new, glittering friends, feeling brittle and high and forgetting the empty reality that Dad is gone and Phillip’s back off with the army and her Gran isn’t even pretending to be that sad and Mum is a shell of herself and Henry…she doesn’t speak to Henry, anymore. If she speaks to Henry she’s going to have to deal with the fact that Dad is _dead _and she can’t she can’t god the thought makes her want to vomit.

So she just does another line of cocaine and makes out with an attractive drummer against the door of the accessible loo and then goes out and plays to an excited crowd and forgets. She forgets. And then she staggers home and by the time she might have to think about it, it’s time to go out again.

Months pass.

**xi.**

He picks up the phone immediately. “Bea?”

“I can’t do this,” she slurs. The music from the act after her is loud, throbbing in her ears. “It’s not even been a year and I can’t cope. Maybe I should just go throw myself off Tower Bridge and then it would all be so much better, I wouldn’t be such a fucking failure, a disgrace to the monarchy, a…”

“_Bea._” Henry’s voice is anguished, but he doesn’t try to demand why she’s not in rehab. A truth: she couldn’t stay. It was too much like the hospital. “Where are you?”

“Dunno.”

“Not good enough. Try harder.”

Bea searches her memory. Next to her, a couple is aggressively making out. Her head pounds. “Camden. I think.”

“Okay. I’m coming.”

“No, I…”

“I’m coming.”

**xii.**

_[half an hour later]_

“Bea.”

“Go away.”

“Bea, please. Please. Don’t do this. Don’t shove me away again.”

It’s Henry. He did say he was coming. She phoned him, didn’t she? Bea considers for a second. Her high is wearing off, the blurring, cocaine-induced pleasure fracturing around the edges, the real world rushing back in like a tide. God, her head hurts. But it’s Henry, and he looks like he’s been crying. Odd. He’s usually better at covering it up, god knows Gran has nagged him enough about _the dignity of the royal family, really, Henry, you are eighteen years old you should know better. _But then again it’s not every night your big sister disappears from rehab. She looks up. Pez is standing a few feet off, his car keys glittering in the streetlamp-light. He looks serious; it doesn’t fit right on his face.

“I’ll go wait in the car, mate,” he says, and Henry must make some kind of response because then Pez is gone. Henry hovers for a moment, so Bea smacks the cold marble stairs next to her.

“Come on, baby bro,” she says, slurred. “Come talk to your big sis. What do you want? Me to go back to rehab, huh? Get back to normal? To the palaces and the openings and Gran’s bigotry and the whole fucking pretense of being a princess, god…”

“No, Bea.” Henry sits down next to her, so close that their knees touch. Belatedly, Bea realises that she’s shaking. “Bea, I…”

“You what?”

“I…”

The thing is, everyone thinks Henry is so confident, so perfect – literature degree from Oxford, champion polo player, beautiful pianist – that no-one realises he can’t communicate for shit. Bea lets her head fall onto his shoulder, waits it out. He’ll come out with it eventually. He always does.

“Bea, I _need _you to get better,” he says. His voice is thick. Bea reaches out for his hand, twines her fingers through his. The signet ring he’d gotten from their father glints on his little finger. Look at them, a prince and princess sitting on the grimy steps of someone’s apartment block in Camden. The lights from the pub she’d just come out of melt across the pavement – somewhere there is a drunk scream. It’s like a fairytale gone all wrong, she thinks, amused. No-one coming to save us. God, Dad, what would you think?

“I’m trying.”

“You’re not. You should be in rehab.”

“I get this shit from Phillip and Gran, babe,” she says. “Don’t need it from you too.”

“_Bea._”

“What?”

There’s a pause, a stillness, and then Henry blurts: “I’m gay. I’m gay and I can’t be gay, Bea, I’m a prince of fucking England, I’ve got to marry a woman and have babies and do all that dutiful shit and I can’t, I just can’t do it without you, please get better Bea, _please._”

He’s crying properly now, huge gasping sobs, and Bea breathes through her shock, wraps her arms tightly around him and pulls him close.

“S’okay,” she says, roughly patting his hair.

“It’s not.”

“Who else knows?”

“Pez. Pez has known since the first day of school. Maybe Dad knew, I never said anything but…”

“He would’ve known. Dad was good at knowing things.”

“I miss him so much, Bea.”

“I know,” Bea says. Her heart feels like a sinkhole, all gaping and hungry and not knowing what it wants but willing to take anyway, to take and take and take. Maybe she knew subconsciously about Henry being gay. She wonders. He’s always been polite whenever Phillip has tried to talk about girls with him, but never all that interested; she’d just thought he was more interested in literature and music and horses than women. He’s only eighteen, she’d told Phillip once at the start of the year before Dad had died, it’ll happen. Not everyone wants to shag their way through university. It makes sense though, now she knows. Now she thinks about Henry with a man and thinks, yeah, it fits. It fits.

Henry is still crying, hunched over and cradling his misery to his chest as quiet as he can. Misery doesn’t befit a prince. Nothing befits a prince except duty. God, Bea knows that - god, how could she have abandoned him like this?

“Hey,” she says, eventually, pressing a kiss to his sweater-clad shoulder. “Hey. It’s going to be alright.”

**xiii.**

Years later, she’s playing guitar at her brother’s wedding and gazing out at the bright crowd of guests, swollen with happiness and too much to drink. Henry is right at the front, arms in the air, singing along with her and she looks down at him, at Alex, at their friends, and then back at her boyfriend who is going hell for leather on the drums, and she thinks yes. This. _This. _

Then: Dad would be so proud. The thought doesn’t cause her much more than a twinge. Somewhere, she’s sure, Dad’s headbanging along.

**xiv.**

At three in the morning, Beatrice Fox Mountchristen Windsor makes a decision.

She hasn’t had cause to regret it, yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream at me on Tumblr: @if-fortunate


End file.
